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Survival "No, Really" Mode coming to Fallout 4

You may have had the feeling that Survival Mode got gutted from Fallout 4 prior to release. All it did was fiddle with the damage intake/output and, uniquely, modified the heal rate. Felt like there may have been more in the works that didn't make the cut.

Well, now they're doing it. In the spirit of Hardcode Mode in New Vegas and all those popular needs mods that came out for Fallout 3 and Skyrim. And I like the sound of... nearly all of it. Some crafty type fished the details out of existing game files and Bethesda have since kind of confirmed his observations.

Saving

Manual and quicksaving are disabled. To save your game, you'll need to find a bed and sleep for at least an hour.

Combat

Combat is more lethal for everyone. You now deal, but also take, more damage. You can increase the damage you deal even further with "Adrenaline" (see below).

Fast Travel

Fast Travel is disabled. If you wish to be somewhere, you'll have to physically travel there.

Weighted Ammo

Bullets and shells now all have a small amount of weight, which varies by caliber. Heavier items such as fusion cores, rockets, and mini-nukes can really drag you down.

Compass

Be sure to keep your eyes peeled, as enemies will no longer appear on your compass. As well, the distance at which locations of interest will appear has been significantly shortened.

Adrenaline

Survival automatically grants the Adrenaline perk, which provides a bonus to your damage output. Unlike other perks, the only way to increase your rank of the Adrenaline perk is by getting kills (hostile or otherwise). The higher your Adrenaline rank, the higher the damage bonus. Sleeping for more than an hour, however, will cause your Adrenaline rank to lower. You can check your current Adrenaline rank at any time in the Perks section on the Stat tab in your Pip-Boy.

Wellness

You'll find it difficult to survive without taking proper care of yourself. You must stay hydrated, fed, and rested to remain combat-ready. Going for extended periods of time without food, water, or sleep will begin to adversely affect your health, hurting your SPECIAL stats, adding to your Fatigue (see "Fatigue" below), lowering your immunity (see "Sickness" below), and eventually even dealing physical damage to you.

Fatigue

Fatigue works like radiation but affects your Action Points (AP) rather than your Hit Points (HP). The more Fatigue you've built up, the less AP you'll have for other actions. The amount of Fatigue you've accumulated is displayed in red on your AP bar.

Sickness

A comprised immune system and a few questionable decisions can end up getting you killed. Eating uncooked meat, drinking unpurified water, taking damage from disease-ridden sources, such as ghouls and bugs, or using harmful Chems all put your body at increased risk for various ill effects. When you are afflicted with an illness, a message will appear onscreen. You can view specifics about your current illnesses by navigating to the Status section on your Pip-Boy's Data tab and pressing [RShoulder] to view your active effects.

Antibiotics

Antibiotics, which can be crafted at Chem Stations or purchased from doctors, heal the various effects of sickness.

Bed Types

The type of bed you're sleeping in determines the length of time you are able to stay asleep. A sleeping bag will save your game and may help save your life when you're desperate, but it will never allow for a full night's rest and the benefits that come with it.

Crippled Limbs

Crippled limbs will no longer auto-heal after combat and will remain crippled until healed by a Stimpak.

Companions will no longer automatically get back up if downed during combat and will return home if abandoned without being healed.

Enemy and Loot Repopulation

Locations you've cleared will now repopulate enemies and loot at a significantly slower rate.

Ok, ok... let's get this one out of the way. I hate the sound of Sleep-To-Save. I can't stand checkpoint-save systems in general, and this is worse. Think about it, at least games like BioShock Infinite and Metro: Last Light are relatively linear experiences, wherein devs can space the checkpoints reasonably well. But this? I've got, like, shit to do, man. Like, you know, going to work the following day? I don't wanna spend time, if I deign to play on the odd weekday evening, running around radioactive Boston looking for a virtual bed before I can get to my real bed. Or maybe it does Save-And-Quit too, Diablo-style? Even so, running the risk of losing an hour's worth out of my weekend due to a stray bullet is not something I'm up for.

This is a potential deal-braker for me. I'd love almost everything else - get to that in a second - but if enabling manual saves can't be toggled back on or at least modded back in, I think it'll jump straight from "challenging" to "frustrating" for me, too much to put up with.

The other thing I'm iffy on is disabling Fast Travel. Not viciously opposed to it, but without some sort of replacement feature - Skyrim had those carriage thing, Fallout 4 has Brahmin caravans... - could see parts of the game degenerate in quite the slog and it'd significantly impact settlement building possibilities.

The rest of it, if nicely balanced, sounds pretty cool. I'd like to do a second playthrough, and I think I'd like it to be with that stuff.

I can already imagine the hilarity of the settlement invasions when you can't fast travel.

Enemies not appearing on the compass makes me wonder what the point of Perception is other than determining which perks you can take, and Perception is already pretty nerfed since they only appeared once hostile anyway.

From what I've heard about the upcoming 1.4 patch, settlements will be able to defend themselves without and correctly report it, so there's that. But it could definitely be a problem. All the more reason to enable fast travel between caravan locations and perhaps big hubs, like Diamond City or Bunker Hill. Gives you more of a reason for building caravan stalls in your settlements. On a sidenote, Pillars of Eternity "you're gonna get raided in X days" approach might also be a plus, though Fo4 is pretty permissive too.

I think Perception also influences your hit chance in VATS. But yeah, never got why they only made aggroed enemies ping on the compass, makes the stat a lot less useful.

You know, a lot of this stuff is dependent on the finer points of balancing it. I only whinged about the two I'm genuinely concerned about, but some others could be good or meh. Like adrenaline or differentiating between beds on how long you can rest. Sounds a bit much, that last one. The problem with these "realistic needs and conditions" in Beth games is that they've generally never hit the right note - New Vegas's vanilla Hardcore Mode was too lax and added very little, mods for Skyrim tend to be overly complex and disruptive in their pursuit of "realism." I tried this mod for Skyrim and despite its generous customisation options, its linear rather than threshold-rigged handling of hunger values got to be a nuissance, where you'd often have to consume several items at a time. This never happened in STALKER SoC (only game that did it right, in my experience) where I think I only once had to scarf down two food items when I was near starvation, and the mechanic was designed as part of inventory weight management and world loot from the get-go. Will have to see Beth's implementation in practice.

Well, it just came out in public release. Now gotta wait for a console enabler and save enabler.

Also, they changed the mods listing, anyone know how to manually edit the plugins lists? There was a thing about adding an * in front of the mod name during Beta, but I'm not sure whether that's still valid. I've been using a basic mod manager that someone put together but I'm not sure it's gonna get updated in a hurry, and I'm not keen to get the Nexus Mod Manager for now, nor do I want yet another account so I can use Bethesda's integrated one.

- New Survival difficulty
- Survival adds additional challenges including no fast travel, saving only when you sleep, increased lethality, diseases, fatigue, danger and more. See the in-game Help menu for more details.
- Characters set to Survival difficulty appear under their own Character Selection filter
- Third person camera movement improvements when player is close up against walls and other objects

Fixes

- General stability and performance improvements
- Fixed rare crash related to reloading a save that relies on Automatron
- Fixed issue with the robot workbench camera not moving properly immediately after canceling out of the menu
- Fixed issue with perks being repeatedly added when reloading a saved game while in robot workbench
- Fixed issue with Ada not properly traveling to an assigned settlement
- Robots can now be assigned as settlement vendors
- Fixed issue with “Appropriation” where blueprints would not appear properly if the container had already been looted prior to getting the quest
- In “The Nuclear Option,” entering the Institute using the targeting helmet on Power Armor no longer inadvertently causes the player to go into combat, and become stuck in the Institute
- Fixed distance check with Robotics Expert perk
- While in Workshop mode, if the Jump button is remapped, the Y or Triangle button can still be used to jump
- Fixed issue with “Defend the Castle” where speaking to Ronnie Shaw would not properly complete the quest
- During “The Nuclear Option,” fast traveling away from the Institute immediately after inserting the relay targeting sequence holotape will no longer block progression
- Fixed issue where Workshop placed light bulbs would occasionally not light properly
- Fixed occasional flashing issue with entering and exiting Power Armor
- Fixed issue where terminals would not work properly after downloading and initializing an Add-On from the Add-Ons menu

Alright, I've got my Fallout 4 installation updated to 1.5 with mods enabled. It's saving and loading, everything seems in order so far, just got out of the Vault with a new character in Survival Mode. So I'll put some notes below on updating, though your mileage may vary. Don't take my word for any of this, just going through what worked for me. Nor can I guarantee you won't have trouble further down the line doing this.

Note that I'm doing this by manually managing the plugins list. I don't use the Nexus Mod Manager nor have I touched the new in-game Addons or Mods menus. From what I understand the in-game manager tends to vie for control of your plugins file with your third party mod manager, so I'm happy to let 'em be for the time being.

1. Back stuff up. Your saves and .ini files in the Documents folder, as well as the mod files in your primary drive's Users/AppData/***/Local/Fallout4 folder. In the latter, plugins.txt manages enabled mods, the other two I don't really know. I suspect that DLCList.txt is used by the in-game manager to track available plugins, loadorder.txt might be what it's called.

Anyway, just back up anything you might wanna restore or have as a reference later. I even made a full copy of the install, just in case.

2. Remove any GUI mods you're using from Fallout 4/data/Interface. People using stuff like Full Dialog Interface and DEF_UI have reported crashing on startup, and it's not surprising, there are new mechanics linked to the UI in 1.5. So delete everything and reinstall after you're done, FDI has a new version which works, HUD menus I don't know. Strings for FDI I think you can leave in there, but if you want to be safe, revert to the original ones and then reinstall the modded ones later.

3. In your Documents/My games/Fallout 4 folder, if you have a Fallout4Custom.ini, open it up and remove:

[Archive]
bInvalidateOlderFiles=1
sResourceDataDirsFinal=

If you have it. Not sure if it's necessary or people reporting it are misdiagnosing problems from the Interface mods, but what the hell, do it. You should only have the default entries under [Display] in there now.

4. Now open up your Fallout4.ini and paste bInvalidateOlderFiles=1 there instead, under [Archive] somewhere. I've seen other suggest that you instead use sResourceDataDirsFinal to add, after STRINGS, all the other directories for MESHES, TEXTURES, etc. but this seems to work for me. If it doesn't for you when you eventually load the updated game, try sResourceDataDirsFinal instead of bInvalidateOlderFiles.

One more point here - if you update the game and you crash, you can try renaming Fallout4.ini and running the launcher should create a new one. If it loads with that, then go back and try changing whatever you need changed.

5. I'd suggest you start up the game to make sure you haven't removed any base asset at this point, so that if something doesn't work later, you know it's the update and not a deleted file.

6. Ok, now cross your fingers and update the game from Steam. Once done, launch it but don't click Play, just close the launcher window down again.

7. Now go and update F4SE, there's a full release for the current version of Fallout 4. Even if you haven't used F4SE, go get it. You can launch the game with it directly, without going through either a mod manager or the default launcher.

8. Last step, edit your plugins.txt file. There's a point of dispute here, some say that the vanilla entries (Fallout4.esm, DLCRobot.esm, DLCworkshop01.esm) should no longer be featured, whereas others think that could lead to some load order conflicts. I've gone with the second camp and so far I'm not complaining. What you'll want to do is to go back to your existing plugins.txt in AppData/Local/... and an asterisk in front of each entry in the mods list. So, to give you an example:

Any new mod you wanna add, just stick a new line in there, along with an asterisk followed directly by the filename of the .esp. But wait until you're confirmed to be up and running before adding anything new in the mix.

9. Ok, now you should be ready to play. Were you reaching for your mod manager? No! Bad TTLG member! Just launch via f4se.exe instead. On a serious note, I dunno, up to you, but I'm happy to leave the managers alone until the kinks are worked out.

10. Hopefully you're fine at this point and your game's in working order. If you were using Full Dialog Interface or have new mods to add, you can try them now. If you crash, try restoring the default Fallout4.ini, not sure what else to suggest as, luckily, it hasn't happened to me yet.

So, assuming you're good and you now wanna try the new Survival Mode, you'll probably want to make it less frustrating. Which means you'll need your console and your saving back. And I'm happy to confirm these are working:

Survival Quick Save - by Gopher, in case you're looking for a great Youtube channel for mods. This adds an item to your inventory, under Aid, called QUICK SAVE, which you can just hotkey. When you activate it, it'll trigger an autosave. One caveat, which I half expected: if you start the game with it, it can't get added to you until you have the PipBoy, guessing it runs on first load after activation. So bring up your console, type in help "quick save" 4, and then do a "player additem ID" with the ID it pops up.

2. Remove any GUI mods you're using from Fallout 4/data/Interface. People using stuff like Full Dialog Interface and DEF_UI have reported crashing on startup, and it's not surprising, there are new mechanics linked to the UI in 1.5.

Quoted for visibility.

Was going nuts in figuring out why it crashes ... even made a complete clean reinstall.

Long story short, the .swf format has changed and hence any mod with old format will crash on UI load time (the moment you load save game or start new game).

... this seriously sucks as some of the essential mods have not updated (most notable, in my case: noDotDotDot).

Got a few hours to sink into the new survival (even got all the mods i want updated / replaced ... except noDotDotDot). Won't be home tomorrow ... seems i have to wait a little longer till i get play it more throughly. Still, a new character has born:
* no powerarmor
* no vats
* stats: STR1, PER3 (+early bobble), END5, CHA5 (+special), INT6, AGI7, LCK1
... worried about all the bugs - they are the most dangerous creatures without vats / spam weapon. I would say, seriously, more dangerous than sculled deathclaws.

It is created with FO4Edit script.
* last run on 1.5.157. changed the names of 4097 items
* applicable subgroups for the script: Ingestible, Ammunition, Armor, Book, Flora, Key, Misc. Item, Note, Weapon
* food and water etc show their base HP RAD effects in name
* ... also F if it is food in Survival difficulty and W for water, D for disease (D! for high probability)
* junk shows the component yield divided by total item weight, rounded
* armors are grouped by what they cover (a'la [LegR])
* ... etc ... etc ... etc
* feel free to modify the script to your liking

I might give that a go, depending on how my inventory sorting turns out in Survival. I'm hoping that a side effect of the reduced carryweight will be not ending up with my inventory being a dumping ground that I just can't be arsed to clean out after a point, so there ought to be less to sift through.

On a different note, I really hate sounding like a self-entitled backseat designer, but damnit if it doesn't look like they managed to do exactly what I was afraid of - micromanagement simulator 2016. Oh, you were well hydrated five minutes ago? Well, now you're parched again. Oh, you're gonna ignore that for another five minutes? And take a Stimpak? Well, now you're much thirstier, you're gonna have to click on four items of water. And then you'll be parched again in five minutes. But don't worry, we'll break up the monotony by giving you an illness half-way through.

It seems like you can't clock more than ten minutes without absolutely having to nurse some status effect. My first thought would be that this is because they're balancing the needs system against the overly abundant resources of the vanilla game. Which, yes, will likely even out in the numbers game, but ends up fuelling this fractured gameplay where you constantly have to ping back to the PipBoy. I've only put in a couple of hours, so maybe it smooths out later on, but I rather expect it to play out more like a fiddly Skyrim mod than STALKER.

A little more whining while I wait for my food to cook. I'm having a hard time imagining how some players can actually deal with sleep-to-save, I did see a bunch of threads on the official Bethesda forums begging them not to allow manual saving. I stuck with it through clearing Corvega last night, and it was slow going when I first played it on Normal, now it was a lot harder. Especially since there's still enemies who don't have the decency to kick the bucket after a shot to the head. I wiped several times on entering through the roof hatch alone and it was frustrating enough, I imagine if I'd had to start over from hell knows where I'd have just given up on Survival altogether.

Also... Dogmeat. Survival Mode graduates him from annoying to an outright hazard. It's worth noting that, technically, he is programmed to get in the way since he goes in the direction your cursor's pointing. In cramped spaces, he's a nightmare. And it's a pity, because you can clearly see all this work that went into modelling his behaviour, and it's generally very compelling, but his constant blocking really grates on you. My suggestion would've been to reduce his collision bounds, preferably to the player alone, to allow you to "squeeze" past him in tight spaces. Yeah, there'd be clipping, but I'd take that any day over not being able to backpedal from an incoming grenade. Raiders looove grenades. Supermutants do, too. And gunners. You get the idea.

Bonus point for him falling off Corvega and popping up a marker to get down and give him a Stimpak. See, I couldn't just jump from where I was, too high up, and if I'd gone the long way around to the stairs, he might've taken his cue to return to Red Rocket. That's where the console comes in. Click, moveto player, Stimpak, problem solved.

One last observation on fast travel. I'm not bothered yet, but I imagine that soon enough I'll want a mod to let me build fast travel points between settlements, otherwise managing them would probably be unfeasible. I don't mind not being able to collect scrap for settlement building (can only afford to carry stuff I need for weapons and armour modding), I plan to cheat myself some wood and steel on each one just because I don't wanna strip the vanilla locations completely, I like most of them, but setting up effective supply lines and shifting settlers between places is just something that I can't see myself walking all over the placer for all the time.

I do like the needs concept, though, which is why I want Survival in the first place. Jury's still out on the implementation, but the core is great. Suddenly, I have a good reason to be happy on looting Radroach meat or finding a cooking station. And as a piece of advice, do carry purified water with you. You'll need it.

I am kind of surprised that they didn't disable fast-travel by default while letting you build those mats that serve as fast-travel targets at settlements. That would actually be a pretty awesome compromise between being able to fast travel everywhere and not having it at all.

I imagine they thought it would be "too easy", as it would be just a formality to plop a mat somewhere in a settlement. Would work for me, but doesn't seem like the direction they went for. I thought they might consider linking it to building caravan stops instead, since those have a higher barrier of entry, but that would still be a bit of a bother seeing as you have to do some stuff for Bunker Hill first.

Put in another 45 minutes last night and ran into another issue with Dogmeat. Dumb mutt fell off a building again, but the "heal your companion" objective vanished after two seconds on its own. Finished the fight without having strayed away and he's just idling about in the same spot, not wounded but unresponsive. Re-enabling him did nothing, only got him back by shooting the bugs out of him, then applying a Stimpak. Admittedly, that was rather satisfying, just hope it didn't leave any bummed out flags behind as I've overwritten the save.

Reached level 32 with my new char - so, i guess it's time to share my thoughts (no vats, no powerarmor, no followers of any kind [can't stand the excessively stupid artificial stupidity], no 'nades, no chems [if at all possible *]). A "no regrets" build -> if there is any point in game a perk would look like a waste then i am not allowed to take it (so, no loot enhancing perks, no exp boosting, no price reductions, no gun-nut past the first perk etc etc).

*) 0 chems taken so far, but i carry a few of the good ones around for dire times. Stims and other such cures are not classified as chems.

Sickness:
* most are very minor and you can just ignore completely.
* antibiotics are plentiful when you really want to get rid of something on the field in the middle of nowhere (carrying about 3 with me and storing 10-20 at home).
* 0 cured by doctors (i tend to forget i actually have doctors in all my major settlements. Also, look previous points).

Have died twice so far, both completely my fault.
1. @level 11, when returning from Tenpines with the quest. When i went there i saw a bunch of bloatflies and decided to avoid them since without vats and/or specialized weapons they are all kinds of complete pain. Well, when i returned i kind of forgot where they were and got jumped ... and one of them was a legendary ... and i totally panicked. While i managed to kill them all - i died of poisoning a second later as i forgot to take the 250 poison resistance chem, foolishly opting instead to concentrate on not missing any of my time-limited shots. Did not take any jet either while the situation clearly called for it.

2. @level 27, in the city (somewhere around the mass fusion building). After clearing a building from the inside and using the bed to save i thought to exit the building from the front door - knowing that there are at least 4 baddies outside there ... somewhere. Well, there indeed were 4 in immediate kill-the-moron 180 degree flanking position with one of them being legendary ... there were also and additional 3 in the immediate vicinity that managed to contribute before i hit the ground. Seeing that there was no cover and considerable chunk of my health was gone before fade in even ended - i died. Psychojet would have probably saved me as i had a high damage 32 mag combat shotgun drawn and everyone was close to my face ... but the mistake was just way too stupid (the seconds i had i was thinking of "why the fuck did i just do that" instead of "psychojet").

Have managed to survive all the 'nades thrown at me ... with a few really-really close calls. The merits of valuing cover and escape routes when dealing with 'nade spammers.

Focusing quite a lot on settlement building - with additional limitations:
* Supply line between two settlements only allowed if they are close by via the natural paths without other potential setlements inbetween. I want a sensible supply network or none at all (had to postpone connecting my primary Hangmans settlement considerably as the nearby settlement had its radient quest spawn very inconveniently and had no spare settlers to send to Graygarden to connect from there to Starlight [to avoid killing Starlight settlement growth]).
* Settlement must be logically functional and sufficiently built up (if you do not have the resources to do so then DO NOT GET THE SETTLEMENT).
* Obviously, a shut-up-Preston or equivalent mod is needed to avoid getting spammed by settlement quests you absolutely cannot do under thous rules.

Not using any settlement attack mods this time and surprisingly have not had an attack ... figures.

------------------

Food and water are slightly annoying - they do not seem to have a buffer region (ie. no negative effects at slightly hungry / slightly too full ... it would double the need_to_eat/drink time while leaving the actual consumption etc completely the same). Brainfart at Bethesda side.

Sleep to save. I have not used the manual save even once (exceptions excepted: 3 times to fix loading errors - as save and reload is all that can fix them) without having a bed nearby (also always checked if the game would let me use the bed beforehand). I'm astonished how many beds there actually are. Have never slept in any non-proper bed (PS. if you sleep in anything for 0 hours then you CANNOT EVER get any diseases vs any time in any quality of bed has a small chance ... good to know if you do not use manual-save mods and have to use a bed to save).

Have had 4 crashes (Two of them caused by me insisting to run as soon as i can after the engine force-disables running due to nearby cells not being fully loaded in yet. The other two in proximity of excessive alt-tabbing ... my music player does not like whatever the game is doing to the system ... it is weird at times) - all just seconds after saves thankfully.

TCL is the most used console command, especially helpful to get around the astonishing amount of stuck in getting behind terminal animation (In case anyone did not know, TCL toggles collisions on/off, which means the animation can ignore all the obstructions inbetween - even got stuck in the concord museum terminal this playthrough x_x). TCL for the win!

There is way-way too much ammo and food everywhere and no way to spend the caps.
* I am on non-rad food diet ... occasional because-i-feel-like-wanting-that excepted ... and who can say no to Nuka-Cola, really.
* Trying to mod all my guns to take rare ammo (which luckily does more damage anyway), so i can buy them expensively with cheaply sold other common ammo. Almost there. It will probably help, but not solve the problem.
* Cannot see anything providing a sufficient caps sink - even with all the shops in settlements i still have over 19K caps already.

Leveling is insane fast! I went from sanctuary directly to Red Rocket to Concord and felt over leveled all the way.
* Slightly unrelated funny: reaching the roof and realized that i can't actually get down from there without the power armor (that i do not use) ... felt like a complete dumbass going straight back in and past Preston ... "don't mind me, just passing through, yes-yes i have not forgotten about the raiders and what the revolting old hag said".
* Concord then spawned a Yao guai at the camp site. Took a shot at him ... he was slightly surprised and confused whether that was wind dusting his fur or was some idiot shooting at him with a shitty pistol. I opted, wisely, to vacate the area immediately.
* Next the Diner (where i completely failed and consequently barely survived the standup ... oh, well, first time i have ever lost the thug drug shop . It's really convenient to have TWO stationary shops near Starlight so early). The second time past it a Rad-scorpion spawned. Since i had my first real guns at that time i opted to take a shot at him ... and then immediately "opted" to expediently take refuge in the Diner. Was land locked there in Tremors style for a while till it gave up and went away. That was awkward.